I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.

I certainly think it's important to speak up and say how unacceptable Donald Trump is. I'm always more than willing to do that.

We are already seeing a degree of instability in the world because Obama seems to have consciously wanted to step back. Donald Trump is going to be "Obama squared," a more extreme version of the same thing.

The use of force to liberate people is very different from the use of force to suppress or control them, or even to defeat them.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

Saddam Hussein had nerve gas and used it against his own people, he had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and he almost had a nuclear bomb in 1981 and in 1991. And he had been caught with anthrax in 1995 by the UN inspections after denying that he had it.

It would be a huge mistake to abandon democracy promotion. Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia. However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.